Jacket

Anna Joy Buegel
2 min readMar 22, 2020

I missed him, my brother. I missed him long enough for my closet to be slowly overcome with black t-shirts and punk boots and leather accents… my skin a skeleton for the thrown-back laughter I needed to hear again.

I wasn’t sure what I would do if I had him close to me again, wondering if the leaving wasn’t, in fact, part of my doing. A failure of oldest birthright, unseen in the midst of “secular” music and second-piercings that were corroding his soul and my own- as I was assured it was, in both tender insinuation and abrupt phrasing…

So I filled my closet with the things he would like, hoping against hope that others could tell how much we were alike, how much he and I stood back-to-back amidst the chaos of the worlds around us. It didn’t matter that I didn’t hear from him much or that the “adults” expected my relationship with him to change him for the better- I buried my confusion beneath layers of dark sweaters and lingo I had heard him use.

Some of it was similarity, for sure, but when this brother I missed moved into the room down the hall from me, I felt the weight of all the things I’d kept up slipping away. Like losing a layer of skin, the rebuilding stings- and we are by no means done with the smarting pain yet… But I’m finding out, as he stumbles into the house in the mornings, humming songs and cooking obscene amounts of pasta for “breakfast” before his overnight shifts- I’m just glad he’s there again. We have no clue where we are, together, most of our banter from a dozen years ago and a little stale. But I can hear him laughing. Any chinks and scabs can be worked through as long as physical presence weighs against them. For however long, he’s here.

The leather jackets have (mostly) receded from my closet and the boots have toned down, replaced by markers of other bodies I miss hearing and praying over in person. And don’t get me wrong; we need physical reminders of the things we cannot see- feelings and leadings and learning and hopes fleshed out in tablecloths and tshirts. But the frightened clinging to something else when you cannot reach another body- that may be coming out into the sunlight, and for that I am grateful…

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